


And All The Dead Lie Down

by IrksomeIrene



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Awesome Molly Hooper, Canonical Character Death, Dead People, Death, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Magic, Minor Character Death, Molly Hooper Appreciation, Molly Hooper Appreciation Week, Molly Hooper Appreciation Week 2018, Near Death Experiences, Necromancy, Original Character Death(s), POV Molly Hooper, Secret Magic, Temporary Character Death, necromancer Molly Hooper, or something like it, past Molly Hooper/Jim Moriarty
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-05 16:01:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15866982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IrksomeIrene/pseuds/IrksomeIrene
Summary: Molly Hooper is not exactly what she appears to be. It's unfortunate not all are blind to her secrets.





	1. Touch

**Author's Note:**

> For someone who hates poetry, I sure do steal a lot of titles from the form. This one was kidnapped from [an Emily Dickinson poem](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/it-was-not-death-i-stood-510) I quite like.

Molly Hooper had known she would work with the dead since before she had known... well anything, really. She had known her ease with death had been the reason for so many barely hushed arguments behind closed doors between her mother and father. She knew it was what gave her mother's doting smiles their leery edges and her father's shoulders their slump of resigned certainty. She knew it was why, when they came home from school one day to a house empty of her mother, her father was not the least bit surprised.  
  
Heart broken. But not surprised.  
  
Later, when little Molly asked her da if mum would have stayed if Molly had managed to keep away from dead things, hadn't brought home rotting rabbits and ravens to keep instead of stay puppies and kittens—if mum would come back if Molly could keep it to herself; Mr. Hooper gave an answer that was not an answer, looking as if he'd lived a thousand, thousand years.  
  
"It's in yer blood, petal."  
  
He cried quite a lot that night. And Molly wondered if one day she'd come home and again find herself in an empty house.  
  
After that, she tried her hardest to keep away from dead things—or, more accurately, keep the dead things away from home. She had always liked girly things, always been a cheery child. But now she knew there was a part of her that was wrong, that was bad. So she covered it in kitten calendars and atrocious jumpers that made her da laugh and glitter gel pens and bright yellow bumble bee wellies. She practiced smiling in the mirror so she could always wear one that suited her. She remembered to keep her bad puns and morbid jokes hidden under her breath.  
  
She was so good at being hidden, people forgot to look at her at all. Despite her terrible, clashing wardrobe and sunny disposition; hardly a soul at school knew her. She wasn't really anyone's friend. She wasn't really anyone's enemy. She wasn't gossiped about or picked on. She wasn’t really anything.

Being forgotten was rather lonely. But as the years passed, she found herself growing into it and it did afford her one luxury; it allowed her to see quite a bit more than most.  
  
Over the years, as other children learned how to exist within their social circles, within the roles they and others created for themselves; Molly learned how to watch from the outside. People watching was her second favorite hobby. It was always surprising to her at how loudly people could speak their secrets—how boldly they could wear their hearts upon their sleeves, and still remain unseen and unheard by those around them. People watching often made her feel like perhaps she wasn’t nearly as different from the rest as she felt.

It was also how, at the age of fourteen, she watched two upperclassmen bruits from the footie team beat Peter Thomas to death in the wood behind their school. It had been so completely unreal, Molly didn’t even try to scream for help or fend the bastards off. Later, she’d learn the signs of shock and recognize them in her fourteen year old self. But the guilt and shame of it would never really go away, etching itself into her bones in the silence she kept.

It felt like days before she was able to make herself move again, well after the boys had left the body behind. The stillness of Peter’s breath was unreal. The thundering crunch of leaves under foot was surreal. The entire thing felt like a tingling, distant dream, something far and away from reality—some strange work of modern art she couldn’t wrap her head around. There was a little part of her that felt almost coherent, it told her to go home. Pretend nothing had happened. This was all a strange sort of day dream, an unreality. She could forget about it tomorrow.

But the body…

The body needed tending to. She needed to tend to it. It was her job—her _duty_. This was her place in the world; right here and now. The thread had been cut too soon and she need to tend to the body. So her footsteps whispered through the thundering of autumn leaves and her body moved with stiff joints from being so very still for so very long and then—a life time later—she was beside the body that once housed Peter Thomas. He wasn’t as bloody as beatings in the movies. And the blood that was there wasn’t bright red. No, it was black—or nearly so. If it weren’t for the jagged rock hidden among the autumn glory they’d bashed his head into, it might have taken much, much longer for Peter to die.

Perhaps this was what celestial mercy looked like.

Molly pulled leaves out of his bloody hair and closed his eyes so he wouldn’t scratch a cornea. She gently arranged Peter’s limbs so he could lay among the red and gold more comfortably. Then, she took his bruised up hand in her own and gently pat the back of it; words familiar and strange tumbling from her lips to comfort him. But with each word she spoke, a heavy drop of intangible something coalesced just behind her teeth. It was heavy and cool, like menthol curling up across the ticklish roof of her mouth and pressing insistently in the hollow below her tongue, leaking down her throat and clawing up her nose to make her eyes water before it finally became too much. She had to set it free—she had to get it out.

A touch of lips to cooling brow was all it took for the unnaturally heavy menthol to pour out of her. It rushed away with delight, emptied from her so swiftly it was hard to believe it had ever been, leaving a strange sort of hollowness in her mouth that made the cavity feel ten times bigger than it once had. And for half a moment, there was relief. Just unadulterated relief.

Then Peter Thomas sucked in a great breath of air, choking, and flailing, and ugly with life. But made right again in a way that soothed something in the part of Molly Hooper she’d spent so many years trying to bury under six feet of kitten calendars and atrocious jumpers that made her da laugh and glitter gel pens and bright yellow bumble bee wellies. Help was gotten, an ambulance was called, the footie bruits became posh London white collar criminals, Peter married a Welsh pub owner, and no one ever imagined that Molly Hooper had called a boy back from Death with a single touch.

It was much later, in the quiet of her death’s sanctuary with the heat of summer beating the putrid scent of decay from the flesh of her most recent finds, it occurred to her:

She hadn’t known Peter’s name before the incident.


	2. Scent

It was difficult to have a steady relationship when you smelled like death.

One night stands were easy. A long, hot shower; lemon oils rubbed into the skin; a dose of pheromone. And just like that, for the night, she was a perfectly normal, if shy and slightly awkward, woman on the pull. But all it took was a day in the morgue for the Cinderella spell to fade. Those that appreciated the smell of death tended to appreciate it a bit too much. Molly may fully enjoy her work with the dead but that hardly meant she wanted to play at being one in bed. And any way, those that fetishized the dead in her disliked the heavy cleaning supplies and lab chemicals that “marred the scent.”

There had only ever been two people in her life that hadn’t seemed to mind the scent of her.

The first was, of course, Sherlock himself. At least, Molly told herself he didn’t mind it. In point of fact, he likely didn’t care what she smelled like so long as she delivered quality work and didn’t make a fuss. Never mind he’d never seen her outside of Bart’s and might very well have associated the scent with the lab and morgue rather than Molly herself. But Molly liked to find comfort in the fantasy that he didn’t mind the way death clung to her; closer than any lover, more faithfully than any friend—certainly more loyal than a man that only found sweet words for her when he needed something.

The second came much later and was gone in short order. For a time and in some ways, he was nearer and dearer to her than Sherlock had ever been. For he—unlike any romantic interest before him—shared that scent of death. It should have been the first warning flag, really. She had thought, for a brief moment, that she had finally done the impossible and found someone else like her. But cuddling shyly into his arms on her couch, simply breathing him in while Glee lit up the dark of her living room, she knew it wasn’t so. He was still just a mortal man at heart.

She spent many quiet moments during their short lived entanglement contemplating how death might have touched him so deeply as to leave that faint, sweet scent in their embraces and that soothing menthol in their kisses. It never occurred to her that he hadn’t been touched by Death but rather sweet, gentle, sincere Jim from IT had reached out and touched Death all on his own.

She wondered—in the pounding quiet of his absence—if it made her a bad person to miss his death tinted kisses; if there wasn’t perhaps something a bit sinister in mourning not the murdered but the taste of the murderer.


	3. Sound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't really like how this one turned out but at least it's something!

Sherlock’s very literal fall from grace does not go as planned.  
  
Mycroft had always been the planner—the one with an eagle eye for detail and better than average foresight. Sherlock had always been the one for leg work. He should have asked his big brother for help. He should have let Mycroft think out every possible detail. Perhaps then Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t be making a mad dash towards room temperature in her mortuary.  
  
Molly watched him from across the room, hands in the pockets of her lab coat. She was in no hurry now. Life was forever balanced on a knife’s edge, swaying to and fro, precarious and brief, harried and hurried. But Death was not one to rush.  
  
From the moment she had set eyes on Sherlock, Molly had felt the familiar, insistent sense of duty that came with those that passed to soon. It built in the hollow of her mouth, in the gaps of her ribs, in the void of her throat with every minute. Slow but steady and insistent. Her eyes flicked to the other body laid out in her death’s sanctuary and begged without a word for that same persistent sense of duty to come upon her.  
  
Jim had been brought down only minutes ago but Molly already knew waiting would do her no good. Jim would not bow to her begging. He would not rise to any bait. If she brought him back, he would not thank her for it—would not be Jim, in truth. She had made that mistake before—only once before. Never again. It pained her that she could not even tend to his body properly. Whether they wrote him down as Jim from IT, Richard Brooke, or Moriarty on his certificate of death; he had still been her nearly-boyfriend for a brief while. No official record of his could bear her name now. Not if she wanted to help the much more insistent dead man across the room.  
  
For Sherlock Holmes certainly wasn’t done with the world yet.  
  
She isn’t sure what she’d going to tell Sherlock when he wakes—isn’t sure what he’ll remember. There’s quite a lot of fake blood mixed with the real about his head, she has his change of clothes (disguise) and a bag packed with supplies tucked into an empty cooling unit. She might not have to tell him anything. This—what she is, what she does—is so far outside the realms of his wildest imaginings and he was always so confident in his own mind to fix things; he won’t ask questions—not serious enough for her to worry about a thoughtful lie, at least.  
  
And for a long, long few moments, Molly contemplates simply… letting it go. She could simply open her lips and breathe all the magic from her lungs into the empty air. She could set it free and maybe that would be better. Perhaps, if she let him be, Sherlock would finally find rest—finally be at peace. Life had not been easy or kind to him. Perhaps death would be more hospitable.  
  
No more boredom.  
No more drugs.  
No more suffering.  
  
Jim was so content in his death. Why couldn’t Sherlock rest in peace? He was forever agonizing over life—why couldn’t he give death a go? But even as she thought it—even as she reasoned and rationalized at the logic; her lips did not part, her magic did not set itself free. And eventually, she knows this is not her choice—this is her duty.  
  
Still she delays and she tries to clean him up as best she can. Part of her is still waiting for Jim to ask her for a return ticket; part of her is simply shattered by the sight of Sherlock dead under her hands, knowing she’s about to bring her most precious and dangerous secret to the most brilliant detective in all of the UK—possibly the world, and wonders endlessly if what she’s about to do is genuinely the right thing. But eventually, she can no longer hold back the ever sharper icy menthol breath of death and life that is filling her up from head to toe and every gap between every atom on the way.  
  
Gently, gently, Molly leans over the woefully empty vessel and with a quiet sob and a few short tears, presses her lips to Sherlock’s cool forehead. Her eyes cannot help but press tightly closed against the agony of this moment. The sound of Sherlock’s first gasping breath and Jim’s absolute stillness is like a physical gutting.  
  
She was right not to worry about Sherlock asking questions. He’s up and moving like a jack rabbit long before the overwhelming fog of revived disorientation has cleared. He sends a text from her phone as he’s hastily trying to clean himself and dress and not fall on his ass all at once. He babbles all the while, deducing and rambling and asking questions he’s answering himself nearly before the his own question has left his lips.  
  
And then he’s gone.  
  
Just… gone. No goodbye. No real parting words. No more information spared to her on where he’s going or what he’s doing now. Just a swinging door in his wake.  
  
In the cold, in the quiet, Molly is alone again. And even in her most beloved and sacred place; Molly can feel the yawning void of this emptiness drowning her for a moment. Then she pulls herself back, draws in a deep breathe, and grasps for something selfish.  
  
Drawing back the zipper of the body bag, Molly spends a moment simply gazing at the criminal mastermind. She wonders if she ever really knew him—if anyone had ever really known him. She wants him to have a second chance, a clean slate. She adored him—or some image of him—and he deserves better than suicide. Yet, when she places her lips to his forehead—not commanding him back, never again commanding anyone from their rest again—and gently calls into the ether for her Jim; it is not enough. She linger there for half a minute, a minute, two—she waits and waits, she hopes and hopes. But no one answers and the body is still cool and empty with a gaping hole where a mind should be scheming.  
  
Somehow, this second silence is worse than any before.


	4. Taste

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hella rewrote this chapter before I posted it. It's kind of crazy how different this turned out.

He does not let the atrocious shades of pink and abundance of kittens fool him when he finds it. It takes up such a minuscule bit of the internet it’s a miracle he found it. Well, not a complete miracle. Caroline hadn’t been as tight lipped in the end as she’d perhaps realized, though she had lasted much longer than he’d ever anticipated. Perhaps filthy beasts like her could endure quite a bit more punishment than humans—not as much higher level thought for their bodies to worry about before they finally shut down.  
  
Once the atrocious blog was found, he didn’t even need to dig through posts to find hidden clues that might help him track her down; the girl hadn’t even hidden her IP address from her posts. It was almost a pity this would be so easy.  
  


* * *

 

London is an ancient city. It remembers the old days. It remembers blood and plague and fire. It remembers magic. And there are safe places in London for people like her. There are quiet cafes and secret door night clubs. There are knitting groups and even a few cycling clubs. Magic is not dead. Not yet. Not in London, at least.  
  
The Old Oak was one of her favorite pubs. It was well hidden from the world and took a touch of magic and a long bit of a walk to get to but it was well worth it. Patrons unmasked of their human guises, mages of all sorts flirting across the room with one another, ancient lads at seats that seemed a second home, fresh young faces seeing their world for the first time—knowing some taste of freedom. There weren’t brawls here, there weren’t scuzzy gents trying to cop a feel, there was just the friendly din of life and the warmth of hearth and rooms well filled with warm bodies.  
  
She’d started coming more and more often after Sherlock’s slightly-more-real-than-planned death. She had her very own spot and the barman knew her favorite on tap. But familiarity and habit bred a false sense of security. The alcohol probably didn’t help, either.  
  
So it was little wonder that it took Molly so long to realize she was being followed home as she teetered her way home after last call. It was hard to think through the haze of fear and beer but she managed to wander in the direction of a police station, looking over her shoulder nearly constantly now, even knowing it was the worst possible move. She knew calling someone might be better but she couldn’t think of anyone to call much less anyone that would take her call at this hour. She wasn’t even sure what she’d report to the operator if she dialed 999. She couldn’t exactly call and report some bloke that may or may not be following her.  
  
Molly holds off on going to the pub for a week after that. Takes a few extra shifts off people looking for some time away to fill the empty space. Even if most of the extra work is in the lab rather than the morgue, she still enjoys it over the painful quiet of her home and the new paranoia that crawls up her spine every time she has to make her way between home and work.  
  
But even safe at work or tucked at home behind locked doors, she wonders constantly about the man in the foggy night. She has the new fears that creep up on her and make her wonder if it was one of Jim’s pets coming to tie up loose ends or take some sort of twisted revenge or whatever it was that might make insane criminal types follow a co-worker’s ex home. And she has the tried and true fears of Vatican assassins and the “hunters” of the other Abrahamic religions ready to murder her in the streets or spirit her away to never be seen or heard from again. (Though as weeks and months have passed since The Fall, the more Molly has begun to question if there was anyone left to miss her; if the world would notice Molly Hooper dead or alive.)  
  
But by the end of the week, Molly has convinced herself it was a one off. Just a creepy bloke; not the last weirdo she’ll ever encounter in the streets of London and hardly the first. So she goes back to the pub—wary and alert for some time. And again, as familiarity and habit creep in, so comes that false sense of security. She feels safe for weeks before the terrifying confirmation that this isn’t anything to do with Moriarty or Sherlock or the surreal games that orbit the pair.  
  
But it isn’t a vengeful shadow in the foggy streets at midnight or a scene from her life long nightmares of kidnap and torture by “men of God.” It isn’t anything but a bitter taste in her coffee.  
  
It was a cliché how they’d met, really. She’d gone to her favorite cafe to write up some of her findings for a paper she hoped to submit for peer review soon without Toby to flop his entire body across her keyboard, and instead had found herself being chatted up by an adorably awkward gentleman. He was handsome in a quirky way and it felt nice to be chatted up by someone that seemed genuinely interested in more than a quicky.  
  
He offers to buy her a coffee. He prefers tea but he insists she has to try this special blend they’ve apparently got that’s absolutely to die for. Molly doesn’t like (read: loaths) when men do this sort of thing but the conversation’s been nice and—quite frankly—she’s lonely enough to swallow her irritation and nod politely.  
  
He’s back faster than she expected and she’s a bit relieved it wasn’t some sort of extravagant dessert-in-a-cup sort of coffee as she’s much more used to the simple canteen coffee with a bit of cream. When she takes a sip, her entire face freezes to prevent the brutal cringe trying to escape and she desperately wishes she hadn’t taken the cup away from her lips so quickly—she might have had a chance to spit it back out if she’d taken her time there. He gets up in that nervous, fluttery way of his to fetch a spoon or something (it tastes so bad she can hardly hear him) and her entire face contorts the moment he’s out of sight. She gives a quiet, choked sound of disappointment.  
  
“God, that’s awful.” She manages to vent just before he returns and she’s forced to smile pleasantly again; as if she hasn’t just been served some sort of sewer sludge.  
  
She wants to believe it’s just burnt—that this handsome man doesn’t have a taste for whatever the hell is in her cup. But good god it tastes worse than simply burnt. There’s something truly foul about the drink and she avoids it as best she can, hoping he won’t notice her cup going cold as they continue their pleasant conversation—though it’s so very hard to concentrate on anything but the painfully bitter taste on her tongue—it’s almost like bile. She still accidentally takes a few more sips out of mindless reflex and regrets it with every inch of her soul every single time.  
  
She doesn’t notice exactly when she starts to feel strange. It’s like a clock quietly ticking in the background. You don’t hear it until someone points it out but you know it’s been at that tick tick ticking for a while. But then it’s too hard to concentrate on what Tom’s saying and her thoughts begin flitting about and trailing off, and her eyes won’t focus, and the nausea sets in, in a matter of minutes; and god the whole thing feels like some sort of revenge of the flu. Her thoughts are still scattered and she doesn’t realize how hard it is to stand until she’s trying to get out of her seat and find the loo but even drugged, she’s got enough brain under her command to connect a few dots.  
  
The man that tried to follow her home, the oddly bitter taste of her coffee, the clogged and oily feeling in her veins that chokes up her magic and makes her feel like she’s going blind.  
  
This was so much worse than any nightmare.  
  
She thinks she’s babbling her excuses about forgetting an appointment as she blindly shoves her laptop in her bag—she leaves the charger without much thought. She’d rather spend £70 than risk a second more in this cafe with that man. He’s protesting and she feels his hand on her arm but there’s a bustle of students and it’s just enough to let her dash out of the shop and into the street. She can barely think, can barely walk—she feels like it’s all momentum carrying her now—but she makes it to the lady’s of a little shop and doesn’t even close the stall door behind her as she drops to her knees and forces everything up that she can.  
  
It somehow tastes worse coming up than it did going down. Burns more than stomach acid alone. She calls Meena when she can’t make herself vomit any more. Molly’s not sure it’s the drug or the fear that makes her shake on the chilly tilled floor until Meena appears with worry etched deep into every inch of her face but when Molly finally lays eyes on her, the pathologist dissolves into terrified sobbing. Meena comforts her as best she can, takes Molly back to Bart’s to run tests in hopes of figuring out exactly what was given to her and what antidote they can use. But once the results come back and Meena’s dropped Molly back at her flat, Molly knows it’s the end. This is further than even Meena thought she’d go—this is Meena’s every worst nightmare come to life—it’s why Molly and Meena don’t talk any more. Meena’d rather turn her back on the world of magic than live every day looking over her shoulder for this sort of thing.  
  
Molly brews the healing herbs in warm mare’s milk, feeds Toby, showers and dresses for bed, calls in sick for the next two days, and finally—after staring at her screen for almost an hour—Molly Hooper deletes Meena’s number.  
  
She’s not felt this alone since she’d listened to the long silence of her father’s last breathe. And she wonders—in a detached sort of way—if she isn’t going to get to see him again very soon.


	5. Sight

They trickled in like the first drops of rain before a proper storm. Molly knew she wasn’t getting all of them. The deaths weren’t suspicious enough to be named murder and she could hardly go to Lestrade with this, however much she wanted to. But neither could she turn a blind eye.  
  
So she pulled them all from their coolers, laid them out seven in a row in the nearly freezing room, took in the sight of her silent dead, and began her examinations. She was meticulous, thorough, and kept an eagle eye out for similarities. Two of the seven had been given the same drug as Molly (she had known before she’d finished the labs, of course, but seeing it in black made it difficult to not see her own face upon each corpse). Three had signs of a sedation enchantment. And all seven mages had been tortured.  
  
The bodies were bloated to varying degrees by their time in the Thames and most of the damage was internal but mangled fingers and broken bones partially healed and so, so much internal damage left little doubt for Molly. As much as the realization terrified and sickened her, it was something she could take to Greg. It was hopefully the sort of mistake serial killers made right before they were caught.  
  
It was this thought that gave her a bit of a bounce in her step even after nearly 28 hours straight of working off the clock. Greg promises to see what he can do (she knows he’s on tenterhooks even though he’s still—by some absolute miracle or through the work of Big Brother—a Detective Inspector) and Molly falls asleep on the tube home, barely remembers how she even made it to bed.  
  
Dead magic of all sorts continues to make its way to her autopsy table—she tries not to imagine her face on every single one and mostly fails. Molly dutifully takes each report to Greg’s office then attempts to drown her ever growing worry and terror in the bottom of a bottle, curled up on her couch with Toby. She doesn’t go to The Old Oak any more. She doesn’t go to her favorite cafe. She goes to work, to her home, and occasionally to Tesco’s.  
  
And then she catches sight of dead man in the mirror of her locker and inexplicably is filled with such hope. Sherlock is back and kicking and London will be the better for it. But she hesitates to bring the case to his attention. At first, she tells herself she needn’t bother, Lestrade hasn’t given her word of any progress so surely he’ll take it to Sherlock. But then he doesn’t. So Molly tells herself he’s much too busy with other cases—outside of the rather lovely, if occasionally fumbling case he invited her on, he seems to be a bit too busy to even make regular visits to the lab since his return.  
  
Then a fourteen year old boy—with on one to claim him—was laid upon her slab. She could feel he wasn’t done with life. She could feel the familiar menthol building rapidly in the hollow of her mouth, rejoiced that finally she would have an eye witness—that she wouldn’t have to open up a child. Only, when she pressed her lips to his forehead and breathed out the cool magic, it rolled off his form in visible waves of blue and green. In her shock, she noted in that detached sort of way that it looked surprisingly like intensely colored vapors of dry ice. And then shock gave way to slowly creeping panic as she tried again and again and again all to the same results.  
  
For days she kept the body, tried to minimize deterioration, made sure his name didn’t pop up on any one else’s list for autopsy, and tried again. Every day, again and again and again. Until one day, she opened his drawer and the magic did not come. For the second time in her life, Molly cried at work. Quietly, unobtrusively, and with quiet gasping sobs. She knew she should do the autopsy herself, knew there might be clues in the boy. But she couldn’t, not this time. So she put his name on a list, gathered the copies of her reports, and made her way to Baker Street.  
  
She knew why she hesitated now on the stoop of 221B. Sherlock was perhaps one of the few people both intelligent enough and (occasionally) open minded enough to discover exactly how these bodies were connected—might even discover her own secret. But she couldn’t keep letting people die because of it.  
  
She spent so much time and energy on her journey and lingering before she finally knocked on preparing herself to face Sherlock Holmes himself that when Mrs. Hudson answered the door and informed her that he was busy with a client, and would she like some tea while she waited—well, she almost felt disappointed, honestly. Still, she accepted tea with Mrs. Hudson, talked about Martha’s hip and her new man and the lovely couple Martha’s friend kept as tenants, and Toby’s silly escapades at home until finally the tea was drunk, the food was ate, and Molly had no more reason to stay. She entrusted the delivery of the autopsies to Mrs. Hudson and returned home, sticking to busy streets and nearly full tube cars, watching over her shoulder all the way.

**Author's Note:**

> Suggestions for additional tags/warnings and constructive criticisms are greatly appreciated! <3


End file.
